jacob navia said:
Colonel Harlan Sanders a écrit :
[snip off topic polemic]
You do not like somebody?
Use private email, blog, whatever.
You do not like spinoza111?
Let's discuss about C ok?
As I've demonstrate many times, other than stupid language lawyering (*),
it is simply not possible to "discuss C" here, without being "off-topic"
by most accepted definitions of that term.
Hence the regs have, long ago, led the charge to change the real topic
of the group to that of interpersonal BS. We have merely followed their
lead.
(*) Which, although fascinating to some, it is of little interest to 95%
of the population.
More specifically, they are in search of the person they are afraid
they've become. They aren't "programmers". Some of them are retirees,
others of them are the sort of caretakers left in meaningless jobs
after enormous "death march" software projects were completed long
ago, who are occasionally called upon to make minor changes.
My father was a smart man, for he asked me in 1971 where the jobs in
software would be once we got done. The answer of course was the
constant waves of layoffs of programmers and other middling white
collar professionals, combined with the post-Enlightenment need to
appoint a low-level demi-priesthood (complementary to the high priests
of the corporate world, the CEOs who in fact know very little, not
only about culture, science or even business, but of their own
operations), resulted in the sort of half-literate monks and vergers
and eunuchs who ceremoniously post here.
Seebach, for example, appears to have become an expert in scripting
languages because based on my own experience at Princeton (where the
slow academic decision process could never make up its mind whether
new software was needed, and where this process always decided to buy
and not make in order to evade responsibility), when you're a
programmer who wants to code but is waiting for some "study team" to
come up with some unreadable "report", you have nothing to do except
attend boring meetings and write meaningless reports. I automated
functions using Rexx on the mainframe in this downtime, and it appears
that the only programming Seebie can do consists of shell scripts he
decides to write.
These people are unable to write new code, and afraid to lest they be
subject to mockery for trivial mistakes as they subject real producers
to mockery.
Take a look at William Langiewiesche's book on Captain Sullenberger's
smooth landing on the Hudson river of a US airways Airbus.
Langiewiesche makes the point that although Sullenberger was working
at the maximum level of coolness and professionalism, the Airbus had
been designed, and programmed with software, deliberately to never
exceed its design limits, and its software made final adjustments to
Captain Sullenberger's own inputs which caused the water landing to be
as smooth as possible, something which almost eliminated panic during
egress.
[I rather doubt that the Airbus 3xx series was programmed in C.]
We've become servants of systems and as such, our job is not to ****
up and reassure customers, bosses and clients that we won't. Based on
this, I would never as a client hire Heathfield in a programming job,
because he's a liar and makes absurd claims about the power of C, like
an airline pilot who wants to fly 707s because they give him more to
do in the cockpit.
If you want a real job, get out of programming and go to Haiti or
become a teacher.
